Given that a few decades ago obesity and overweight rates were nowhere near what they are today, this shows that a large part of the population is weak, fragile, and not very interested in their well-being.
I want to emphasize that a few decades ago, people were much thinner in the Western world and did not hate their lives because they could not eat a triple cheeseburger, go hungry constantly, or feel physically deprived. Those were my parents and my grandparents, I know them.
But if you show them hyper-caloric food that makes them feel like crap, they can't say no. It's disappointing. And the same can be said for addiction to social media, horrible TV series, and constant music everywhere.
Do you think it is because the people before were mentally stronger? No, it is because they lived in a different environment. If you were to transport those people from decades ago to today, the same portion of them would become obese.
That's what I'm saying. It's not that people were stronger then, it's that, as many times throughout life, traits are revealed by circumstances, there's nothing particularly physiological about feeling the need to eat like hippopotamuses that have been deprived of food for months.
The unattractive, low-status man (or woman) has less trouble remaining faithful than the handsome, high-status man (or woman). Not because they are more virtuous, but because they are not as exposed to temptation. But fewer people justify the unfaithful than the “big eater.” And that's something society and culture have decided, for now.
> "there's nothing particularly physiological about feeling the need to eat like hippopotamuses that have been deprived of food for months."
There are many people who don't feel that need. They don't actively resist cramming cake into their mouths, they just glance at the cake disinterestedly and move on. Or eat a bit, and feel that's enough, and don't want more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016 has discussions about the dramatic rise in obesity after ~1970; refined sugar, chocolate, butter, doughnuts, McDonalds, cars, TV, have been around longer than that. Could there be involvement from Glyphosate pesticide, from reduction in smoking appetite-suppressing cigarettes, Lithium contaminated water supplies, increased Vitamin A added to milk and grain supplies, rise in antibiotics used on farm animals, which causes some people to gain and retain weight more easily?
They are the same people now that they were then. Humanity has not become any more weak, fragile, or uninterested in their well-being — it has simply become harder to resist. TV was appointment viewing and cut off late at night. Before the walkman, there wasn’t much option for music everywhere (the scourge was newspaper-readers! but the paper is only so long). And that triple cheeseburger today wasn’t acceptable or available to eat unless you made it yourself. Healthy eating being hard is a product of collective decisions to make it hard.
It used to be that the devil on the shoulder was the tempter. It isn't depressing that parents and grandparents can't say no to lizard brain instincts, it's depressing that we allow companies to exploit that in a devilishly evil way - to harm people - for money, as much as they can, in almost every way they can think of.
Imagine how much money and time and effort is spent making Doritos 2% more tempting; the crunch, the flavour intensity, the packaging layout, the packaging colours, the mouthfeel, the shelf stability. The same for ice cream and everything else. How far can Kelloggs stretch the gap between the strawberry presented on the packaging and the almost-zero strawberry in the pop tart? Or the honey pictured on the Honey Nut Cheerios box with the "hint of honey" in the description on the back? How To Cook That[1] on YouTube on Kellogg's misleading and potentially misleading claims.
By looking at the size and bellies of construction workers, farmers, and people doing all sorts of jobs with significant physical activity, one cannot find much support for this hypothesis.
Back in the day, (almost) everybody was not fat, from the academically inclined to the construction worker. Today, many are overweight, from the professor to the agricultural worker. There used to be more walking, which increased caloric expenditure by 300-700 kcal per day, although sport and recreational physical activity was limited to the young.
The main problems have been the easy availability of cheap and tasty calories, combined with a surprisingly low resistance to the ingestion of those calories.
What the explanation is, that actually requires research. Anything from new food additives, changed lifestyle habits forced by the pandemic, increased chronic stress, screen addiction compromising other opportunities to be active, less walkable neighborhoods, more elevators, higher calorie diet, cost increase in healthy diet to just name a fraction of possible factors.
Or that the situation was different, advertisers hadn’t mastered the 24/7 cycle of selling easy junk food in both home form and fast food form. Every generation thinks they’re superior to the new generation and says “why don’t they just…. “ when a new generational problem comes up. People screaming out against ozempic and friends are just angry that maybe it does work well enough and that people don’t have to struggle for once. Our brains weren’t built for our modern life style. It used to be that people virtually had lots of experience eating Whole Foods, TV was relatively new, parental guidance on “that’s junk food, you can have a little not a lot”, our jobs weren’t built around screens and pecking on keyboards, bombarded by emails and phone calls even after we go home via 1 hour commute each way. It’s easy to say “you’re all a bunch of lazy bums” but it’s also lazy and not true.
> "People screaming out against ozempic and friends are just angry that maybe it does work well enough and that people don’t have to struggle for once"
No, I'm angry in the way that you punching me in the face with my own hand, saying "stop hitting yourself" then offering to sell me a painkiller subscription might make me. The sheer ridiculousness of Big Food vs Big Pharma with humans trapped in the middle. Humans presented by geeks as perfectly spherical rational decision makers, but actually lizard hind-brains wrapped in frontal lobes and language centers, with very exploitable biases, feelings, fears, and base drives and very few defenses against it, and those defenses being undermined at every turn by political lobbying and profit seeking.
I want to emphasize that a few decades ago, people were much thinner in the Western world and did not hate their lives because they could not eat a triple cheeseburger, go hungry constantly, or feel physically deprived. Those were my parents and my grandparents, I know them.
But if you show them hyper-caloric food that makes them feel like crap, they can't say no. It's disappointing. And the same can be said for addiction to social media, horrible TV series, and constant music everywhere.